Last Friday I've got an opportunity to join other JavaScript developers at Meet.js 2018 Summit Conference and now I would like to share my thoughts about that event.

tldr; it was amazing! I would like to say thank you to all of the speakers for sharing their experiences during their talks!

Organization stuff

The whole organization-related stuff of the conference was top-notch! Despite the fact of small delay caused by a bit longer registration of conference participants everything went smooth and without any problems for the attendees I think. Choosing MTP as a place to hold the conference was very wise idea IMHO (it's located 50m from the Central Train Station in Poznań).

Talks summary

First talk was about comparing learning JavaScript to mastering foreign language by Joanna Bochyńska. It was one of these talks I had in mind once, but never thought of sharing this as an article or conference speech - it was presented in a very clear and light way which makes it a great warm-up for upcoming more technical presentations - good job!

Second talk was about probably-next-hot-thing-of-the-nearest-future, which is Reason presented by Bartosz Król. This talk was one of my favorite ones because of the good balance between introduction to the tool, sharing own experience about it, and listing pros and cons about using it on production. I've also enjoyed the level of English language pronunciation by Bartosz, which felt like listening to a native speaker (I've noticed it's still a rare skill in the Polish dev scene).

Because third talk from the agenda hasn't actually happened, next talk was about implementing Machine Learning on the front-end side of the code by Szymon Frąszczak. I've enjoyed this talk as well - I've heard a lot about ML stuff, but didn't have an opportunity to listen about it from the front-end developer perspective (most papers is only about Python). Szymon managed to present not-so-straightforward for the js dev topic in a very accessible (and enjoyable) way :)

Fourth talk covered very similar topic - Machine Learning with TensorFlow.js by Patryk Omiotek. Honestly, I didn't enjoy this talk - it was like going through the video/interactive tutorial or docs of the TensorFlow lib - (lots of code and going through it without any own interesting comments from the speaker) nothing less, nothing more.

Next presentation was about testing by Piotr Balbier. Since I've heard he's from Netguru and the way of how much I've enjoyed their other presentations about Rails stuff I was hoping for a really good talk about not-so-really interesting topic for me. Unfortunately I was disappointed a bit. Piotr hasn't managed to interest me about his presentation and I felt a bit like he was not prepared good enought (there was a bit too many 'yyy' and 'eee' thingies, comparing to other speakers).

Fun fact #1: a friend of mine almost fell asleep during this talk xD

Sixth talk of the day was about Accessibility in modern web applications by Joanna Kupis. In the past I had an opportunity to work on the related task to make a web app more accessible for some group of users. Thanks to Joanna's presentation I've learned a couple cool new hacks I didn't know earlier - thanks Joanna! :)

Another talk was about Face Detection in web browsers by Mirosław Ciastek - another interesting topic and I didn't know about Face Detection API that is built-in in Chrome :) Also very cool was the fact that Mirosław has prepared performance comparison charts between various available solutions - kudos!

An introduction to the micro front-ends by Jakub Holak - I've found it most interesting from all the conference talks. Jakub has shared his idea about scalable solution for the front-end codebase that he managed to implement at the cloud company his working in. It was a bit controversial though, since most edge case that has raised on my mind quickly (to develop every micro front-end part using different framework) would rather work at the moment only in the ideal world environment :) But the main idea has got me interested so much, that I'm gonna try it in nearest future in my little side-project just for fun :)

Write once, debug :) run anywhere by Anna Konopka - this is my personal second best talk of the conference. It was based on real-life project and while listening to Anna it feels like a very personal experience share (like in a video/blog post maybe? :) ). And the Pacman effect that eats slide dots was a great detail :) Good job!

Styling React app with css-in-js library (emotion) by Przemek Suchodolski. It was just ok for me, probably because I don't care about React.js framework much, but Przemek's presentation managed to interest me and make me think about it - does really styling in React is not so easy and straighforward (and out of the box?) solution like in Vue's Single File Components?

The last but not least speech was about scaling front-end for Jira web app by Mateusz Szerszyński. It was a great share of the insights how it is made by bigger players on the market. Also, Q&A section was the best of all talks I think, since Mateusz has presented there even more details about how the stuff is done at Jira :)

Atmosphere

It was great. Despite the fact that this conference was pretty big (so many people out there!) I've managed to find couple colleagues from previous workplaces and/or universities (and even meet new ones ;) )

Everyone was very friendly, and the sponsor's stands were also pretty creative (I had an opprotunity to win a Mario Cart race on SNES mini :D).

Besides that, attendees has been able to try some VR (there was a way to long queue for me to try it ;) ), play some variation of snake game or try to find 1 of 4 treasures that were hidden in the conference building.

See you… sometime! :)

I will not lie - the reason I've participated in this year's Meet.js summit was mostly because it was located in Poznań :) Going to such events while wanting at the same time not sacrifice family time is hard - so thanks to the organizers (and sponsors) for making it happen - looking forward for next conferences like that! :)

-- ł.